Arousal in Ruins: The Color of Love and the Haptic Object of Film History[pdf]

Elena
Gorfinkel

Film
History is the Outcome of An Absence. It proceeds by trying to explain the
meaning of disappearance of moving images, and the value of these images in the
cultural memory of a given period of time . . . If all moving images were
available in their ideal state, equally visible in their integrity, there would
be no such thing as a history of
cinema.

In the numerous
and divergent writings on the status, characteristics and historical resonance
of cinephilia, a relationship to film is posited, one of an ineffable
affection, bordering on obsession, coded through the collection and
recollection of ephemeral moments from the cinematic archive. What Paul
Willemen, Christian Keathley and others have called the "cinephiliac
moment" is studded with a tension, caught between the repetition of a
privatized recognition or communion, and the public resonance of a collective
identification, both which trade on the traversal of the senses.3 Cinephilia is a narrative of loss and recovery, of the suspension of sublime
fragments within filmic memory, as Serge Daney suggests in his comment that
"there is a dimension to cinephilia which psychoanalysis knows well under
the name of 'mourning work;' something is dead, something of which traces,
shadows remain."4 In Peggy Ahwesh's The Color of Love (1994, 16mm), the “cinephiliac moment” finds its object in the detritus of
cinema’s history: the ruin is doubled over, in the appropriation of an extant
pornographic reel, an 8mm film which appears to be from the late 1960s. The
film strip is in a state of florid decay. The ten-minute film has been
re-edited and optically printed to preserve the evidence of deterioration,
which appears as a fluid, leaking emulsion on the surface of the image,
obstructing vision, forming ornate patterns and resembling an organic presence
unto itself.

Ahwesh's
serendipitous discovery of this film in a dumpster positions the filmmaker as a
gleaner and archivist, a film historian collecting remnants of an overlooked
cinematic past. If we recall, the cinephilia of the Cahiers era, as well as in other historical moments, circulates in
some way around low cultural texts, be it the B films of Sam Fuller, Ado
Kyrou’s encounter with an Italian exploitation film,5 Paul Willemen's confession of his attachment to the films of Jess Franco, and
Jonas Mekas' and Andy Warhol's patronage of skin flicks on 42nd Street. Even in the construction of the velvet light trap architectonic of the
Invisible Cinema at Anthology Film Archives in the early 1970s, Annette
Michelson observed that, "it was these very features, while conceived as a
means of sacralization of the filmic object and essential in the conception of
a temple for the ritual celebration of cinema as an artistic practice, that
had, from the first, alternatively suggested this structure as an ideally
appropriate site for the viewing of pornographic film."6 All of these anecdotes literalize the "desire for cinema" through a
marginalized, low object. We need no reminder that the history of avant-garde
practice in film and the plastic arts consistently forged the mutual
articulation of art and an eroticized mass culture.

Pornography,
popular and unpopular at once, functions as a limit case for filmic
representation. In an ontological argument regarding the realist ethos of the
cinema forwarded most prominently by Bazin, pornography is seen as perching on
the threshold, at the limit of the representable. Bazin's insights conceive of
cinema as a "molding of the object as it exists in time and makes an
imprint of the duration of the object."7 Thus Bazin heralds the principle of indexicality as the privileged function of
the cinema, as well as the site for its uncanny effects. Linda Williams has noted
how Bazin's realist ontology collapses at the site of the pornographic and
“real” sex, in his essay on Lo Duca's Eroticism
in the Cinema.8 Bazin equivocates, countering his own penchant for the realist tendencies of
cinema; he reverts to the benchmarks of imagination and fiction, over and above
documentary explicitness, as film’s purest aim, stating that: “actual sexual
emotion…is contradictory to the exigencies of art.”9 Bazin goes further in making an analogy between the obscenity of death and sex,
suggesting that if a film can show the beginnings of “sexual consummation” he
would also have the right to demand that in a “crime film, you really kill the
victim…”10 Death becomes the inverse figure of a pornographic ontology. Stanley Cavell
makes just as forceful a categorical argument that "the ontological
conditions of the motion picture reveal it as inherently pornographic."11 Thus, pornography becomes film history's embedded symptom, and Ahwesh's
camera-less film enacts the conflation between the entirety of film history and
the pornographic fragment through the traces of the decay that overwhelm the
film frame. Thus, linking the pornographic with the cinephiliac via the
palpable specter of cinematic mortality, can offer a paradigm for understanding
the conditions for the visibility and redemption of the film image in its
doubled materiality.

The paradox of
Ahwesh’s punk-inflected and feminist cinephilia is in the positing of
pornography as its lost object, an object that must be mediated through its immanent
destruction. On the one hand, the film refers to and engages the critical
debates waged over pornography, disputes that fissured the feminist movement in
the 1980s. On the other, the film in its preserved temporality returns us to
the approximate historical moment of its production—the late 1960s and early
1970s—and to a period that saw the convergence of the ecstasies and subsequent
disillusionments of an international cinephilia; the efflorescence,
proliferation, and commercialization for the market for sexually explicit films
(in adult cinemas, storefronts, and urban theaters); and the emergence of a
politicized, ideologically attuned screen theory, shortly thereafter. These
intersecting histories—not teleological occurrences but proximate developments—are
summoned by The Color of Love’s dense
and complex opacity, its indexicality to cultural, as well as chemical
processes, seen in retrospect.

In its
melancholic recycling of an extant, decaying stag film—in which two women
engage in sexual activity over and with the body of a male “corpse”—The Color of Love proffers its own
theorization of the relation of perceiving and receiving senses to film
history. Ahwesh's film is able to create a conceptual bridge between the
seemingly opposed realms of history and tactility, using both the suggestive
chemical processes that are operating across the physical body of the film, and
the epistemological and cultural legacy of pornography.

In his
sensitive consideration of the critical legacies of cinephilia, Christian
Keathley writes,

“Cinephiliac
moments mark not only the recovery of sensuous experience, they also mark the
possibility of the recovery of history . . . that is in the very technologies which
precipitate the obliteration of history, one finds to use Siegfried Kracauer's
terms, the possibility of its redemption.”12 Ahwesh's film operates as an illustration of a redemptive cinephiliac moment, a
type of core sample rendered historiographic through the material substance of
the film strip itself. In positing the failure of technology, the film
encourages erotic modes of perceptual experience, re-instantiating the auratic at the site and stilling of
disintegration. The failure of cinematic technology—which highlights not the
failure of history but the contours of historical conditions of embodied
perception—activates a philosophical mode of conceiving sexed spectatorship as
coextensive with cinephile modes of looking. Decomposition materializes one
instantiation of the “asystematic” contingency of the cinephilic sensibility,
as suggested by Mary Ann Doane, yet directs it outwards towards a more
generalized horizon of filmic historicity.13 At the same time, a film’s decay inverts the logic of the “cinephiliac moment,”
chosen as it is by the conditions of film’s extra-diegetic handling and
mishandling, and consequently gestures not to the contingency within the
pro-filmic but to the eventuality of the extra-filmic.

Thus, The Color of Love deploys the haptic
sense as a political strategy for reorienting eroticized vision toward the film
historical past. Embodying an imaging of history, the film invokes an unpredictable, anti-telelological causality—as
a field of effects, affects and contacts. The film is the evidence of an
exacerbation of chance—in that the culturally denigrated "shameless"
object of pornography is the material acted upon by the chemical processes of
decay, a certain and allegorical punishment. Deterioration performs an auto-critique
of pornography, a reorganization of historical causalities, cultural and
political indictments through a materalist literalism. The historical immediacy
and sense of "presence" which Ahwesh's camera-less film embodies is
conditioned on a loss, the visible transformation of the film image in the
knowledge of its sobering mortality.

Found Footage: Filmic Ruins

Scholarship on
found footage consistently returns to the senses of failure, dread, and

disaster that
seem to inhere within this mode of cinematic practice. Perhaps some of these
apocalyptic overtures are informed by recent debates around the possible
extinction of film as a viable medium, in light of the encroachment of digital
modes of production and exhibition, as well as the difficult politics of film
preservation. These effects and affects are also linked to the explicit,
artifactual materiality of deploying found film footage. William Wees,
discussing the texture of Bruce Conner's Marilyn
Times Five (1973) states, "the repetition of shots and the extreme
graininess of the film increasingly draw attention to the body of the film
itself, to the films own image-ness. And that. . . is the effect of all found
footage films."14 Catherine Russell implicates found footage films as a genre constitutively
mired in the concerns of history and obsolescence,

Found
footage filmmaking, otherwise known as collage, montage, or archival film
practice, is an aesthetic of ruins. Its intertextuality is always also an
allegory of history, a montage of memory traces. . .

And she writes
further,

The
found image doubles the historical real as both truth and fiction, at once
document of history and unreliable evidence of history. Within this slippage of
representation, the ethnographic body emerges as a sphere of referentiality.
Its indexical claim to the real belongs to a contingent order of time that
resists the narrative of history implied by the salvage paradigm, and it is
this counternarrative of the memory trace that is produced in found footage
filmmaking. The appropriated image may, in fact, be the exemplary dialectical
image. Indexicality does not make an image more real or more accurate but
inscribes a difference within it that Walter Benjamin understood as the
fundamental allegory of the photographic image.15

The origins of The Color of Love are comparably
narrativized in terms of ruins, debris; the 8mm reel was found by Ahwesh in a
dumpster. Therefore the ontological spontaneity of the "found" in
found footage takes on another level of archival significance, as Ahwesh's
authorship is complicated by the existent condition of the silent porn reel.
The inscription of difference within the index is doubled in Ahwesh's film: the
memory trace is a memory of a historical moment, of a represented sexual scene.
The excess difference is that the footage is pornography. But the physical
deterioration of the film is the most privileged testimonial of indexicality to
another—extradiegetic—register of the "real."

The lack or
loss of the object is not masked in The
Color of Love, as the facticity of the film's visible chemical
decomposition matches melancholia with a reinstatement of cinephilia. That is,
the indexicality of the filmic body to history and to decay is conflated with
the index of sexed bodies in the porn film. Lyricism and seduction emanates
from the meeting of these two constitutively different sets of bodies—the
patterns of bleeding emulsion and the pallid, coital nudes—on the tactile
surface of the screen.

Elaborating and
contextualizing the use of pornography as found footage means asking, what does
it mean for pornography to become an historical object which has presumed to
have been lost? What sort of "memory trace" is this staged fantasy?
Pornography is one of the premier sites for sexuality’s historicity, exposing
as it does the conditions of the production of sexualities through
representational codes. Russell comments elsewhere that found footage
allegorizes the practice of historiography in the instrumentalization of the
archive.16 As a retrospective historiography of sexuality, The Color of Love is selective and intensive, rather than
temporally extensive. In contrast to Ahwesh's use of the pornographic text, Ken
Jacobs in his Nervous System performance of XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX,
(1981) extends the duration of a short clip of porn footage, to examine the
structural processes of perception. Ahwesh's film, on the other hand, functions
as a "core sample," a condensation of the pornographic universe into
a re-edited, optically printed ten minutes. In the occlusion of vision
manifested by the decomposition on the film's skin, Ahwesh is able to evince
arousal out of ruin, re-eroticizing the allegorical image through the logic of
its own fatality.

Other uses of
pornography as found footage in experimental film practice are diverse.17 In many of these works, the pornographic imagery encourages an editorial focus
on the screen surface and the manipulations and obfuscations of that surface.
Paul Arthur isolates some of these tendencies of the contemporary avant-garde
and its “(anti)romance of the body,” noting, somewhat edgily, that “explicit
sexual acts serve as yet another paradigm of de-psychologized solipsistic
performance.”18 Pornography’s discourse of excessive visibility necessitates counter-argument
that questions the limits and capacities of the form’s production of knowledge
through vision. Ahwesh's film is distinctive in this respect, as it documents
the collapse of an embodied vision onto its historically embodied object.

Laura Marks has
outlined the ways in which "haptic visuality" engenders an eroticism
that acknowledges and embraces the limitations of vision as a sensual faculty.
She writes, "haptic looking tends to rest on the surface of its object
rather than plunge into depth, tends not to distinguish form so much as discern
texture."19 Although Marks employs video as a site for this play between the haptic and the
erotic, she does not exclude the film medium's capacity to engage with the same
synesthetics. In what follows, I would like to assess the haptic in The Color of Love, exploring both the
occlusion of vision and the means through which perception is addressed
synesthetically and historiographically via the pornographic fragment.

The Dustbin’s Embodied Abstraction

Ahwesh's intervention
and authorial stamp is mediated by the evidential nature of the footage. The
filmmaker explains how she discovered the film,

There
was one film in a big box of damaged reels and cans in the garbage outside
school—and that was the film. On the reel were two regular 8mm porn
films—the second being a sun drenched beach cabana sex romp thing with
characters seemingly out of UCLA, which didn't appeal to me… The film had been
rained on and stuck together (that's why some images look double exposed) and
wouldn't go through a projector—the undulations in the picture (the rhythmic
pulsing of the emulsion damage) comes from the fact that the area of the film
being protected by the spokes of the reel look pretty normal and the other
areas exposed got damaged. The film had more scenes—I can't remember now
what--but I improvised on the printer with sections of the film—slowing it down
mostly and messed with it in editing until I liked it.20

Apart from
editing, optically step printing, and repacing the film, transferring it to
16mm, and adding a lamenting tango by Argentine composer Astor Piazzola, Ahwesh
presents the film as it was found, stating “I like it because I found it that
way.”21Ahwesh's
signature is in the speed and pacing of the motion, its synchronization with
the sound rhythms, and the temporal guidance of the editing is constitutive to
its effects and affects. On initial viewing, however, one can experience
skepticism regarding the extent of the filmmaker's control over the imagery and
the state of the print; the decay resembles decisively painterly effects, and
this further complicates the film’s epistemic status—a perceptual experience
caught between the formal manifestations of the aleatory and the (seemingly)
alchemical.

The dye seepage
forms alternating patterns on the skin of the film, varying from fine mottled,
granular, pixilation-type markings, to large chunky patterns that resemble
fleshy intestinal shapes, organic liquid forms, streaming watercolor-like
textures, and dense staining blotches. The seeping color varies from deep
sanguine red to brownish purple to swampy green and yellow, although the
tonality of the red dominates the substrate of the film's painterly palate. In
turn the color of the naked bodies is a flat, drained pallid white, at times
the edges of their bodies garner a shade of lurid pinkness. There is no
gradation of dark to light, no real perspectival shadow to establish depth of
space. The colors all congeal at the surface, invoking an embodied circulation
system. The blood motif calls forth not only the film as body but also summons
one marker of sexual difference, manifest in the female menses.22

Texture is
extraordinarily important as it operates on numerous registers, working both in
terms of indexicality (historical knowledge: "this image is
decaying"), in terms of associative processes and mimesis, (activation of
fantasy: "this shape resembles flesh, bleeding, painting,
landscape"), as well as on the level of temporal and spatial interpretation,
("this pattern charts time passing,""this texture collapses depth,") and in terms of bodily
response and affect (arousal, dizziness, sadness,)all of which require the integration of
vision with other bodily senses, most prominently the sense of touch.

The abstraction
of these decomposing patterns blankets the naked bodies, alternating from a
level of translucency to a dense opacity in which the pulsating moving colors
and shapes take over the frame. It is very difficult to take in the film and be
able to isolate whole frames, as the patterning forces a certain submission to
the motion of the image and an effect of proximity to the image. In this vein,
Marks writes,

The
viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, engage with the traces
the image leaves. By interacting up close with an image, close enough that
figure and ground commingle, the viewer gives up her own sense of separateness
from the image . . . When vision is like touch, the object's touch back may be
like a caress, though it may also be violent - a violence not toward the object
but towards the viewer . . . Haptic visuality implies making oneself vulnerable
to the image, reversing the relation of mastery that characterizes optical
viewing.23

Marks
assessment illuminates some of the conditions of viewing The Color of Love. I would add, however, that the power and
alterity of the image in this film is in the fact of its historical
vulnerability. Ahwesh's film also complicates attributions of subject and
object, as the physicality of temporal processes mediates between the action on
screen and the viewer, introducing a third term and another position of
viewership coded as both historical and sublime. Violence has already been
enacted onto the film itself, ostensibly the object, and the viewer acts as its
alibi, the witness that satisfies the text's triangulation of positions,
positions unfixed by their allegiance to temporal and material processes. The
decomposition can be figured as another object, or itself subjectivated,
attributing to it a bodily presence.

The
pornographic film is narratively framed by a vampiric, necrophile motif that
supports the affect of the morose, decadent, and elegiac: there is fake blood,
a dagger, and a heavy red curtain. We need only recall Paul Willemen's
association of the "cinephiliac moment" with "overtones of
necrophilia, of relating to something that is dead past, but alive in
memory."24 The dead (or sleeping?) man never revives himself and becomes a prop for the
sexual activities between two women. The trope of death precedes the film's
death by disintegration, and the dead man functions allegorically, the
"dead object" of porn and heterosexual masculinity. Yet he has to be
present, stagily symbolic, to mediate the enactment of “lesbian” sex.He is playing dead, and the women are
playing lesbians. This is part of the generic, tacit convention of pornography,
and one that this pornographic film, typical and atypical at once, is enacting.
Significantly, the fragment that Ahwesh has chosen to comprise the film offers
no erection—the man’s penis remains flaccid through the film— and no
"money shot," two staples of the generic phallic
"coherence" of commercial pornography.

The film begins
with a slowed image of a dense, cracked painterly surface out of which emerges
an image of a woman on a bed with a man. There is no depth to the space of the
boudoir, and directly behind the bed is a baroque red satin curtain that
encases them.Ahwesh edits and repeats
her turning over on the bed twice, and her sitting up and turning to the left
is followed by a burst of gray moldy film, which obliterates the entire image.
Another woman enters and slowly undresses and gets on the bed. A knife is
drawn, and we see that the body of the man is indeed a corpse, with (fake) blood
on his chest. One woman toyingly outlines his body with the point of the knife,
circling his genitals. His un-erect penis is held in close up, and then
eclipsed by a fuzzy blot mark on the screen, as one of the women mounts him.

The tempo and
sound shifts, as there is a closeup to the woman’s spread vagina, bordered by
chromatic fibrillations of decomposition that move from the edges of the screen
into the center, paralleling the vaginal lips and mimicking the motion of a
curtain. The opening and closing of the curtains seems to act mimetically with
the imaginings of a filmic body, which is contracting and expanding. The
materialization of sexual sensation takes on the appearance of an imitative
body, the filmstrip touching itself, embodying the point of contact between the
eye and the screen as a self-regarding caress.

The curtain
effect—in concert with and in juxtaposition to the actual red curtain that
marks off the bedroom in the profilmic space—is also one of the tropes of
retrogression which imbues The Color of
Love with an early cinema aesthetic. Antonia Lant has commented on the
visual components of the haptic aesthetic of early cinema, and the scrim or
screen, which draws attention to flatness.25 The deterioration, which resembles a curtain or scrim, brings the look to the
surface of the image, and along with the pallid whiteness of the porn bodies,
denies perspectival depth, composing the frame of action along a horizontal
axis. Perhaps this retrogression, which can be associated with a kind of
"primitivism" taken up by the avant garde, as per Noel Burch, depends
on the manipulation of motion in the frame.26 In addition, the original reel has no sound, reinforcing the silent film
analogy. The tango music, as its only aural accompaniment, is synchronized with
the speed of the images. The tango’s overfull, flooding sentimentality, as John
David Rhodes suggests, bears an implicit reference to Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928), performing an
earnest and insistent affective intensity that bleeds over into tinges of
histrionic excess, of “showing too much” and implicitly feeling/hearing too
much as well.27 The music paces the speed at which we can see the details of the dye seepage,
accentuating the mournful tone of affective investment.

This editing
technique, of slowing and stilling the image, takes on its most pointed and
poignant quality during the sexual interactions between the two amateur porn
actresses. The music slows to a crawl as the women kiss, caressing each other's
bodies, while the flow of the chromatic decay undulates around them, as if a
halo or protective shield of enclosure. The stop-start motion of the
step-printing focuses attention and isolates the shape of the women's bodies,
their facial affectation, and the shapes of the leaking emulsion. The streaming
patterns that accompany and border the kiss and embrace have a pulsing effect.
The kiss, repeated twice, the second time haltingly slower for emphasis, frames
the two bodies of the women in medium close up, the photographic aesthetic seeming
for one moment to capture glimpsed evidence of pleasure, as well as structuring
the viewers' pleasure in its most poignant iteration. Is this what has been
lost and re-found in the salvaging work of this film? The sexual relation
between these two women seems to motor the melancholic feelings and erotic
mobilizations of the film. Cinephilia is reinvested here, at the nexus of
"primitivism," arrested motion, lesbian sex and the texturing of
vision.

The scene just prior
to this one also manipulates temporal disjunctions around the same-sex
encounter. One woman leans back with her legs spread as the other massages her
reclining body and rubs her genitals. These actions seem to catch the frame,
splitting the screen, as if a malfunction in the projection has disordered the
coherence of the image; we see the lower half of the reclining woman's body in
both frames, she is doubled in the screen, the hands of the other touching her.
Ahwesh's editing, as the mark of her viewing practice, reinstates the
responsive characteristics of the framing cinema to its sexualized content. The
instability of the decay is countered with a retrogressive instability that
freezes motion, allowing brief moments of reverie and erotic absorption. The
rhetoric of insatiability that informs pornography is countered with a
calculated repetition and a challenging of teleological progression. In this
sense the literalized "lost object" of porn is supplanted by a
fantasmatic lost object of an alternative, potentially queer and distinctly
feminist spectatorship, which has been foregrounded through the condensation of
aesthetic texture and temporal transgression.

The Surrealist
filmmaker Germaine Dulac wrote of the virtues of time-lapse cinematography, its
ability to condense motion as a feat of synthetic conceptualization:

A
grain of wheat sprouts; it is synthetically, again, that we judge its growth. Cinema, by decomposing movement, makes us
see, analytically, the beauty of the leap in a series of minor rhythms
which accomplish the major rhythm, and, if we look at the sprouting grain,
thanks to film, we will no longer have only the synthesis of the moment of
growth, but the psychology of this movement. . . The cinema makes us spectators
of its bursts toward light and air, by capturing its unconscious, instinctive
and mechanical movements.28

While Dulac is
speaking of a visualization of growth, Ahwesh's film operates on an inverse
logic, coextensive with the process of decay. The stilling of the frame serves
as a temporary and artificial stopping of that decay, at the same time as it
"decomposes" movement. The speed of the film comes to signify the
onslaught of deterioration, and slowing it down gives access to the mnemonic
characteristics of visual address. This arrested moment makes the privileged
image visible and accessible, inserting it as a "memory trace," a
reorientation of the uses of the visible. Equally, if not more, affecting as
the conceptualization of the sprouting growth, the stilled images throughout The Color of Love accumulate and archive
decomposition itself as indelibly tied with moments of cinephile recognition
and erotic, tactile spectatorship. Making the "invisible visible,"
the motion of time materializes as the decaying inscription on the film strip.
Time, in the form of a formal violence which exacts a sensation of fleshiness
from inorganic matter, operates on it as it attempts to represent spaces of
time.

Making the
"invisible visible" also corporealizes the filmstrip itself, as the
emulsion makes it appear as though a body is turned inside out, animated as
flesh. Being drained of its "content," color, the "insides"
of the film rush to its surfaced exterior, like the draining of a corpse.At the same time that the siphoning off of
the color drains the image of its perspectival depth, it produces a spatial
conceptualization of the film strip as a body.29 In this regard, it is striking how much the decomposition approximates x-ray
photography, a scientific realm of "epistemophilia" which concerns
itself with making transparent the surface of the body and specularizing
interiority.30 Akira Mizuta Lippit, in a phenomenological excursus on the intersection of the
unconscious, cinema and the x-ray, writes: "the x-ray situates the
spectacle in its context as a living document even when it depicts, as it
frequently does, an image of death or the deterioration of the body that leads
to it."31 What is the impact of seeing the filmstrip as embodied? Whereas the x-ray
renders transparency an instrument of depth, and in effect glorifies the
effaced surface of the skin in its transposition to screen, The Color of Love situates “liveness” in
the emulsification process and its revivification of a sensuous perception. In
some regard, this is the central paradox of the film, which motivates sensation
and vitalism out of an evidentially perishing object.

The early
cinema aesthetic that the film employs also intersects with a pre-cinematic
tradition of motion study. Linda Williams has explored the implications and
motivations of Eadward Muybridge's and Etienne Jules Marey's motion studies for
a study of pornography. Motion studies contributed to a technological
production of knowledge about bodies and sexual difference that could not be
severed from a spectatorial pleasure that depended on the fetishization of the
female body.32 If the trajectory of pornography is to make sex visible and make female
sexuality speak some truth, as Williams claims, Ahwesh plays with this impulse,
arresting motion for an alternatively eroticized enjoyment. Yet Ahwesh's film
seems to both concatenate and complicate three conflicting strata of movement:
the movement of the sexed body in the porn film, the movement of the film strip
through the projector, and the movement of history along a physical surface.
The first term in this series is displaced onto the last term, a syllogism
between embodiment and history, and the stop motion effect thus attains a
redemptive, preservationist tenor.

The film
continues from these moments between the two women to a flurry of activity, the
tango playfully speeds up, positions are re-arranged, as the granular and
densely laden patterns of disintegration run quickly past the eye, resembling
art-ified television static, interference, and sudden blotches of sanguine
color. One such abstraction yields to an entirely different scene, and perhaps
another space. A seemingly more naturally colorized female body (there is less
chromatic decay in sections, making the woman look less vampishly pale), partially
dressed, in underwear and opened shirt, lying on her side and masturbating with
one hand. The figure is headless, alternately blending with and emerging from
the onslaught of throbbing deterioration. The film ends within this equally
depthless diegetic space, the final frame stopped on an image of pure seepage
and abstraction, cracked dye, bold patterning of red, green and white, with no
bodies in view.

Erotic Historicity

The bracketing
of the finale of the film within this seemingly disjunctive leap to another
space, another scene, another sexual actor and evidently the beginning of the
reel of another film (the California sex romp mentioned above)—also raises the
question of embodied spectatorship thematically, and in terms of narrativization.
Ahwesh explains, “the last shot in The
Color of Love—a girl masturbating—is the first shot from that second
film. As I was optically printing, it ran into the head of the second film
and I ended up using that shot. Kinda like the viewer or the filmmaker,
or the whole thing is a dream—some metaphor along those lines.”33 The masturbating observer references cultural anxieties about the indexicality
and intentionality of pornography—its mimetic capacity for arousing. The
vernacular of porn's direct effect on the viewing body, its "shame lies in
the fact that it has one unequivocal intention: to excite its consumer." 34 This "corporealized observer,"35 the masturbator-spectator, is the reviled subtextual figure of pornographic
reception. As Williams writes, in correction to the presumptions of porn's
engagement with an inaccessible object, "touch is activated, but not aimed
at . . . though quite material and palpable, it is not a matter of feeling the
absent object represented but of the spectator-observer feeling his or her own
body."36 Ahwesh re-signifies this masturbating figure as a woman, inserting her into the
text as a point of identification for her film’s viewers, structuring a fantasy
within a fantasy. Conversant with feminist film theory and film practice,
Ahwesh asks, “If the lover (man) is gone or dead who activates the film space
and conducts the film's look and where can it go and who killed him
off? Can a female point of view enact the film? If the woman leaves
the movie in the first scene of The Man Who
Envied Women, as a Lacanian gesture, how do you put her back in?”37 Within the impulse towards narrativizing the film, viewers may ask: were the
images that preceded her appearance a product of her lascivious
imagination?Was what we saw previously
a flashback or a travel in time? Was she one of the women involved, now
masturbating to the memory of the events? Or was she also watching a
pornographic film? Sexuality and reception are orchestrated around the
articulation of positions within fantasy. This masturbating figure thus tropes
both the female spectator so sought after within two decades of feminist film
theory and the feminist cinephile, caught in retrospective repose within her
fantasy/ memory; a riposte to the figure of the “dirty old man” which so
animates the febrile pornographic imaginary.

As a relay of
sensation-effects, the film connects the faculty of touch—in terms of both
autoeroticism and the tactile visuality of the molding filmstrip—with a
curiosity about historical contexts in light of our own retrospective viewing.
Who was the audience for this film? The fact that it is 8mm and silent suggests
that it was either a private stag film screened in male spaces of homosocial
bonding, such as Elks Clubs and beer halls or a “split beaver” film, an
intermediate form between the stag film and the rise of the publicly exhibited
hardcore feature, shown in storefronts and on loops in developing red light
districts in the late 1960s. However, since most storefront theaters were using
16mm film as a transitional format in this period, the 8mm film Ahwesh found is
likely the former—a pornographic film made for the home market.38 The films privatized status, and the exclusion of a possibly female
spectatorship, brings us to the presence and presentness of its erotic weight.
Ahwesh’s reworking and salvaging of the text, in its mode of address, embraces
and installs the female spectator as cinephile. The working of the film is contingent on these series of desires and
identifications which structure both the tenor of the lesbian love scenes and
of the exteriorized female spectator who speculatively contains or produces the
phantasmatic operations which have come before.

Melancholic Archive

Therefore, the question
of pornography's capacity to be a lost object turns out to be somewhat of a
ruse. Instead, the evident melancholia present at the sight of the film's decay
is displaced onto two objects. Ahwesh exposes the refused identifications39 that pornography, as a gendered representational system, depends upon,
particularly the clichéd formulaic lesbian "number." By staging the
sex between these women as part of the erotic authentication of the text, the
refused identification is prohibited from being incorporated into the system of
the film and into pornography’s conventional structures of viewership. Having
disqualified the structures of visibility that produce pornographic coherence,
Ahwesh re-signifies the sexual scene in terms of female pleasure, although
there can be a faulty slippage between female pleasure and its representation
as lesbian sex. The loss is not of pornography, but of a type of filmic
experience, a type of reading practice that Ahwesh is re-constructing and
revising. The sensual, tactile elements of the film cling to this constitutive
same-sex relation, depend on it for its potency. The mechanisms of sensuous
perception are part of this revision. If this was a type of reading that
historically has been disallowed by the conditions of exhibition and by the
presumptively male audience of pornography, Ahwesh's re-figuring and selective
editing addresses her own audience in terms of seeing the sexual scenes as
historically past, but experiencing them in terms of presence. Steven Shaviro
expresses this sentiment in his reading of the film:

Watching
it, I do not think: "this is happening now." Rather, I think:
"this has happened already." Nothing is more fleeting than an orgasm,
after all. It's over, almost before it has begun. It happens in the barest
sliver of an instant, like the time between one frame of film and the next. But
it is surrounded by stretches of empty time, in which nothing happens. A time
of infinite longing lies before it. And a time of slow forgetting extends
after. The Color of Love is all about these abysses of obliterated time.40

Time
obliterated, time emptied out: yet what kind of experience of history does The Color of Love provide? Whose history
is it and who has access to it? Despite the artifactual document being accounted
for as an object from the late 1960s/early 1970s, it relays less in terms of
this era—genre conventions and stag film representations notwithstanding,
atypical as they are—and more as a treatise on the process of historical
recognition itself. In this way, the film is a historiographic text. Ahwesh's
appropriation places emphasis on the trans-historical motion of the film from
one reception sphere to another, particularly in its re-signification as
"experimental erotica."41

This bridges to
the second displacement of melancholia, onto the evocation of film history.
Figuring pornography, as the "limit" of representation (Bazin,
Cavell) and classifying it in analogy to documentary and ethnographic modes42 has furthered this critical/conceptual trajectory. The momentum of the
indexicality/intentionality argument, despite its technological and ontological
determinism, facilitates the way pornographic film begins to stand in for all film. The Color of Love deploys this status to make a connection between material
object-ness and tactility, and the subject of film history. Gavin Smith
mournfully and tellingly wrote in Film
Comment at the time of the film's initial release:

What
was this film called? Who directed it? Movie history is built on the mainly modest,
often worthless, contributions of hundreds of thousands of forgotten—not
forgotten, but never known or noticed—lives. Why isn't it more haunted by the
futility of all the work that has vanished into the void? Why does the
resurrection of a decaying ten-minute fragment of something whose totality we
would consign to that void without a moment's thought, cause such questions
briefly to cross the mind?43

As a
fragmentary artifact The Color of Love is able to allegorize a larger body of work, a disappearing archive. Therefore,
a contemporary cinephilia transposes the sensation of revelation and private
discovery onto the narrative of film history itself. Smith's lamentations about
this allegorical loss address the shunted potentialities, the denied possibilities
of future embodied perceptual experiences, which this film has revived.
Knowledge of an inaccessible, irrecoverable loss is conditioned, trained by the
instance of a single recovery. Jacques Derrida has stressed in his Archive Fever that, "the archive
has always been a pledge, and like every pledge a token of the future . . .
what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same
way."44 Derrida's concern, with the mutual articulations of the storage of memory and
the patterns of lived experience, speaks to the impact of the mode of
accumulation of film as documents, their inscription into an embodied practice.
The fact that film is already a mode of mechanical reproduction adds another
layer of excavation for the archival project of both film historian and
viewer.

Smith makes a
distinction in the above passage between the loss of memory, the forgetting of
uneventful lives, and the lack of knowledge about them, weighting the latter as
the more egregious crime. He then directly shifts to a consideration of the
lost archive. The crucial point is the unknowability of the depth, breadth, or
horizon of the archive as abyss. The fragmentary nature of Ahwesh's film can
only be a metonym in its condensation and saturation, for an irrecoverable site
for potential classification. Its melancholy hinges on the cultural capital
that is implicit in classification and the assignation of value to cultural
texts. Pornographic film can be seen in terms of the hierarchical
phylum—genuses, species—of film categorization. But after all, a pornographic
film is still a film. The decay, in
its most extreme ideation, by moving towards a goal of abstraction and
destruction of the original image, will eventually strip the film of its most
defining feature, the images which explain it as a genre, as pornography. By
positioning the lost archive of film history as that which has yet to be known,
Smith is thinking projectively towards the limits of perceptual and
spectatorial experience in terms of the limits on what can or can't be seen,
what can or can't be known, a historical horizon. Christopher Woodward suggests
that, “when we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future.”45 The irony of such a futurity is not the infinite regress of the reproductive,
but the certitude of material dissipation. And in the model of cinephilia
outlined by Paul Willemen, the cinephiliac moment allows the viewer to
speculate about a filmic "beyond:” "Cinephilia designates that
process, indicating that this is an issue in the relationship, a kind of matrix
which says that, in the relationship between film and viewer, the film allows
you to think or to fantasize a 'beyond' of cinema, a world beyond
representation which only shimmers through in certain moments of the
film."46 In the case of The Color of Love,
that beyond has become a horizon of visibility, entering onto the scene as both
the physical imaging of disintegration, and its referential effect of pointing
to an irrecoverable elsewhere of the cinematic archive. The politics of film
preservation are summoned, the raw pragmatic materialism that seems the bottom
line of the discipline of film studies. Pornography, not worthy of
preservation, is evicted by the governing law, but reconstituted as the
materializing object which "reminds" film history of the pleasures
and dangers of sensuous, embodied spectatorship, and which reinstalls
cinephilia as a function, rather than an effect, of reception. So the cultural
fantasy of pornography's destruction by the archival abyss is imbricated in the
use-value of its abstracted lessons about sexuality, recollected as historical
memories. Again Derrida can interject here that "the archive takes place
at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory,"47and
in this way there is no thinking the archive without the presupposition of
destruction, Freud's death drive. The
Color of Love as a ready-made micro-archive, arrives with the dispensations
of its own dissolution.

Touch is often
conceived as a phenomenon of presence, the definitive mode of contact which
forms the impression that haunts Derrida's reading of Freud, particularly of
the "Mystic Writing Pad." The invention of the mystic writing pad
becomes a model for memory and the mnemonic structure of the psyche. Contact is
equally crucial to the self-documentation of cinephilia, which recovers from
ones' own sensorium memories of sensuous perception triggered and found in the
body of films seen, films which have “pierced” the viewer, in the fashion of
Roland Barthes' punctum.48 The skin of the body is less permeable, yet I would argue that the synesthesia
induced by Peggy Ahwesh's film is able to outline the ways in which the
historical impression of death, and indeed, the death of cinema, can leave a
trace on vision, enabling the erotic faculties in the process.

Other
filmmakers have engaged, before and after the making of The Color of Love, with filmic decay as a compelling
historiographic process, one that highlights the chronos of film history
through decomposition. Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical
Nitrate (1991) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002), as two prominent examples, collect fragments of early cinema’s nitrate
era ruins. Morrison scores his images with a soundtrack that emboldens the
creeping horror of cinema’s frangibility and evanescence. Mary Ann Doane has
deployed Decasia as an exemplar of
the continued pull of the materiality of the analogical index of cinema—its
“chemical base” —for film theory, in the wake of digital media and its utopian
fantasy of a mathematically generated immateriality. Discussing the shroud of
Turin as the transformation of index into icon, Doane traces how Decasia, in its effacement of the look
through deterioration marks cinema’s fatality; rather than “straining” to see
the stain as a movement towards figuration and iconicity, filmic decomposition
reverses this signifying chain: “representation returns to the stain, to the
sheer non-iconic marker of existence. What is indexed here is the historicity
of a medium, a history inextricable from the materiality of its base. In the
face of the digital, the image is rematerialized in its vulnerability to
destruction.”49 In its mapping of the relationship between cinema’s material substrate and the
field of representation, Doane’s insight can just as easily apply to Ahwesh’s
film. However, what makes Ahwesh’s work distinct and considerably more radical,
in my estimation, is its chosen historical and generic location, and its
framing of vision in terms of an explicitly corporeal sexuality. The Color of Love induces another index,
the meeting of the spectator’s implied (potentially mimetic) body and the
represented bodies on the screen in a form that persists in challenging and
cementing cinema’s realist ontology: that of “real” sex.

But “real”
death is never too far off. In his treatise on the ultimate cinematic
contingency, the filming of death, Andre Bazin writes,

Two
moments in life radically rebel against this concession made by consciousness:
the sexual act and death. Each is in its own way the absolute negation of
objective time, the qualitative instant in its purest form. Like death, love
must be experienced and cannot be represented…without violating its nature.
This violation is called obscenity. The representation of a real death is also
an obscenity, no longer a moral one, as in love, but metaphysical. We do not
die twice.50

Ahwesh marries
the two tropes and realist spectacles that animate the Bazinian
imaginary—explicit sex and death, here allegorized through cinema’s form.
Ahwesh playfully illustrates the intertwining of these figures, asking after
the motivations of the film: “is the action read as Bataille's alternate sexual
economy on film—an inverted porn and mis-managed act or perverse sex? A
murder mystery? The little death and the big one together?”51 The perverse plenitude of The Color of
Love preserves, and arrests the moment of film’s death, extending it into a
prolonged perpetuity, its process of coming undone paradoxically preserved for
our contemplation—in Bazin’s terms re-embalming the scene of failed
reproduction, in another reproduction. What better testament then, to the
cinema as a viable form than its imminent destruction? Bazin’s investment in
the “qualitative instant” somehow rings hollow, as cinema dies multiply—an
obscenity that perhaps leaves us in its most rapt fascination, but also
continually renegotiates the dividing line between subject and object, living
and dead matter.

Therefore, The Color of Love, having presented
itself as a lost document recovered by chance from an incomprehensible and
unknowable archive, re-directs its melancholia from its pornographic dejection,
displacing it in two directions, towards the erotic scene of a staged “lesbian”
encounter, held suspended within arrested motion, and towards the allegorization
of an impossibly lost film history. Tactility and history are fused at the
point of the film's inscription by historical process, layered over the
obstructed pro-filmic lure of sensate and sexed bodies. Offering a revision of
history, a way to see film historiographically, and an instantiation of a
feminist cinephilia, Ahwesh's film illuminates the conditions and temporalities
of modes of filmic reception, reorganizing the spectatorial senses and locating
them in the physicality of mortal and erotic bodies, both animate and
inanimate.

Elena Gorfinkel is Assistant Professor
in Art History & Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her
publications on cinephilia, erotic film culture and sexploitation film include
articles in Framework, Cineaste, and the collections Cinephilia:
Movies, Love & Memory, and Underground
USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon. She
has co-edited, with John David Rhodes, The Place of the Moving Image, (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming Fall 2011.)Her current book project concerns American
sexploitation cinema of the 1960s and its contexts of production and reception.

13 Doane writes regarding
the “cinephiliac moment,”“What
cinephilia names is when the contingent takes on meaning…whether the moment
chosen by the cinephiliac was unprogrammed, unscripted, or outside codification
is fundamentally undecidable. It is also inconsequential, since cinephilia
hinges not on indexicality, but on the knowledge of indexicality’s potential, a
knowledge that paradoxically erases itself. The cinephile sustains a certain
belief, an investment in the graspability of the asystematic, the contingent,
for which the cinema is the privileged vehicle.” The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 227.

14 William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of
Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 11.

15 Catherine Russell,
"Archival Apocalypse: Found Footage as Ethnography," Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film
in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 238, 252.

29 Paul Arthur contextualizes the
contemporary avant-garde sensibilities which treat the film strip as body: “the
conceit of filmic apparatus as filmic body owes little if anything to the
conceits of Baudry, Comolli, and others; indeed it might be better understood
as an artisanal qualification of apparatus theory, in which sense organs and
the responses they elicit, occupy the position, held by academic theory, of
psychoperceptual or unconscious processes. Foregrounding the film strip as
labile, quasi organic material has roots in Brakhage…yet unlike Brakhage’s
metaphors on vision, the tactics of filmmakers such as Ahwesh, Klahr, Phil
Solomon, Roger Jacoby and the silt collective are not geared to express inner
subjective states but simply to mobilize sensory impressions through optical
experience.” Arthur, A Line of Sight,
137.

30 Bradley Eros's film, X Times X (1998) pushes this association
to its limit: projecting the images live within the frame of performance, Eros
uses two projectors running two reels simultaneously to superimpose footage of
x-rays with pornographic footage.

32 For two versions of
Linda Williams' investigation of motion studies, see: "Film Body: An Implantation
of Perversions," Narrative Apparatus
Ideology, 507-534; and "Pre-History," in Hard Core: Power Pleasure and the 'Frenzy of the Visible.' 34-58.

38 For the history of
16mm adult filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Eric Schaefer,
“Gauging a Revolution: 16mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature,” Cinema Journal, Vol 43, No. 1 (Spring
2002): 3-26; Schaefer has also written a synoptic history of 8mm film
production for mail order and home viewing, ”Plain Brown Wrapper: Adult Films
for the Home Market, 1930-1970,” Looking
Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History & Method, eds.
Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 201-226.

39 I am relying here on
Judith Butler’s reading of melancholy and identification. Butler argues that
heterosexuality is structured by a pervasive melancholia, haunted by a refusal
of loss, in the form of an attachment to a love object of the same sex. The
subject renounces this homosexual desire, and the loss is incorporated into the
ego as an identification. Judith Butler, "Melancholy Gender/ Refused
Identification." The Psychic Life of
Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997),
132-150.